Beryl Markham: West with the Night

Word Count: 450

From West with the Night by Beryl Markham

“They are here, all are here, unseen and scattered, but sharing with us a single loneliness” (526).

“I spend so much time alone that silence has become a habit. Often, except for Ruta and Farah, I am alone at safari headquarters day after day, night after night, while the hunters, following a herd that I have found or waiting for me to find one, are camped miles away. At dawn they expect the sound of my Avian, and it always comes” (527).

“All this, and discontent too! Otherwise, why am I sitting here dreaming of England? Why am I gazing at this campfire like a lost soul seeking a hope when all that I love is at my wingtips? Because I am curious. Because I am incorrigibly, now, a wanderer” (529).

Markham’s writing starts off with her flying her plane looking for the hunters she works with. They have been caught out in a flood and she is desperately searching for them. Eventually she finds them and returns them to the camp. This whole story is filled with a lot of her flying food to her coworkers and their ‘porters’ who have gone on strike, refusing to work because of their previous lack of food. Even with the mutiny, the two hunters, Blix and Winston are still concerned for the porters. They have a certain sense of companionship and loyalty that it seems the porters may lack. However, Markham’s other coworkers comment on this sense of loyalty saying, “Each man is a brother to the next, M’sabu, and brothers must lean upon each other. All the porters are alone. Can I leave them?”(523). The interesting thing about this quote is not only the sense of loyalty portrayed but also the loneliness. He says “all the porters are alone”, but they have each other so therefore they cannot be alone. But Markham later discusses this phenomenon within herself. Her work has become such a habit that it has begun to lack companionship since things are simply expected of her. Because of this she began to live in silence which created a degree of loneliness that she feels should not be there. She is under the impression that all her coworkers are this way as well because she said that while traveling, “someone attempts to break the loneliness” (526) but that no one listens. Ultimately, she is confused, especially at the end, because she realizes that she has all that she wants where she is and yet she dreams of escaping to England. It seems to me like she has almost grown tired of the sameness of her work and what she thinks is a lack of true companionship within it. In fact, since she calls herself a wanderer, I wonder if all of this loneliness makes her think that she does not belong and that going to England would help her get rid of this lingering loneliness.